Difference between revisions of "Dreamhack Troubleshooting"

Latest revision as of 05:15, 28 August 2020

Common Dreamhack problems and their solutions.

My hack won't start

Check out the latest error messages in your Apache error log:

tail -f ~/apache/logs/error_log

(The -f option will keep updating if more errors come in, which can be useful if you open up your Apache log in one window and try to restart Apache in another window. Hit Ctrl-C to stop the process.)

Most of the time, the reason your Dreamhack won't start is because of a code error in one of your .pm or .pl files. The error messages here will tell you where to look.

(If you get a big scary error message that takes up the whole entire screen on startup, look at the very beginning of the error for the file that the error is in.)

I'm getting a database error on connect

If you get an error message that looks like "cluster: status 0: ERROR: Can't connect to the database (clust#0), so I can't update it", it probably means that your $LJHOME/ext/local/etc/config-local.pl or $LJHOME/ext/local/etc/config-private.pl files have been overwritten, thus removing your username and password for your database. Or perhaps they were not fully configured to start with?

If you made a backup of your config files, copy the backup over the live version. If you didn't, just edit the files to put in your username (dh_username) and password (the database password you were assigned at the beginning, not your current login password). Don't forget to change the database name (dbname) as well - it will usually be dreamhack_username instead of just dw. You might want to follow the instructions in the Dreamhack getting started guide for protecting your configs to prevent future problems.

My patch files include all of my config changes

Follow the instructions in the Dreamhack getting started guide for protecting your configs. This will also keep your config changes from creeping into your patch files.

I have .orig and .rej files all over the place

Check the "tidy" script at the bottom of the Dev Maintenance page.

My hack isn't sending me email

Edit your $LJHOME/ext/local/etc/config-local.pl and find the line "$MAIL_TO_THESCHWARTZ = 1;". Comment it out, or change it to 0, to send mail directly instead of through TheSchwartz.

If you think you should be getting emails from the system (such as reinstaller emails, quota warnings, etc) but you aren't, it's possible that the email address associated with your Dreamhack account isn't your most current address - contact mark if you'd like it to be changed.

I need to run TheSchwartz to test something

See the instructions in the Dreamhack getting started guide for how to set up TheSchwartz on Dreamhacks.

I broke a repository

If you've broken a repository in ext, one of the options is to delete it and then check it back out from the original source control.

I want to wipe my install and start over

Make sure you've extracted everything you care about from your installation first, if possible, by e.g. copying the patch files to your own computer.

If you want to wipe out your dreamhack and start over on purpose, type this:

echo reinstall > /dreamhack/var/maintain.d/$$

It will take a few minutes for the install and setup to finish, and you should get a new notification email.

I'm getting "quota warning" emails but I'm not sure what I can delete

Generally, there are only two reasons why you might be getting this email:

• If you leave your Apache turned on, then your Apache logs (in ~/apache/logs/ will probably be taking up a lot of space. You can compress them using gzip while your Apache is stopped. (Generally, it's not a good idea to leave your Apache on if you're not using it.)
• If you've had your Dreamhack since before the transition to GitHub, then you might have a ~/dw-old/ backup directory of your old Dreamhack install. If you do have this, it will probably be eating up about half of your space by itself! It will also be several years old by now, so it can almost certainly be safely deleted unless you have some old patches in there that you haven't yet redone in Git.

If neither of these apply, then you may want to follow this procedure to identify what's taking up the space:

1. Change to your home directory by typing cd.
2. Type du -m --max-depth=1 | sort -n. This command might take a moment to complete, and will show you a list of all the directories and the amount of space they're using (in megabytes). The bottom entry will be for "." and will show you how much space is being used in total within the current directory, including any files (which are otherwise not shown).
3. If you need to be more precise and check subdirectories, change your directory to the directory you want to check and then repeat step 2 again. (Alternatively, you can change --max-depth=1 to --max-depth=2 to check all the directories at once, but that can get a bit confusing.)

As a guide, your dw directory should be taking about 200MB of space or so; if so, the problem is unlikely to be within that directory, and you should look at the others.